Computational science has historically meant simulation, but
there is an increasing role for analysis and mining of online scientific
data. As a case in point, half of the world's astronomy data is public.
The astronomy community is putting all that data on the Internet so that
the Internet becomes the world's best telescope: it has the whole sky,
in many spectral bands, and in detail as good as the best 2-year-old
telescopes. It is usable by all astronomers everywhere. This is the
vision of the virtual observatory -- also called the World Wide Telescope
(WWT). As one step along that path I have been working with the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (especially Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins) and CalTech
to federate their data in web services on the Internet, and to make it
easy to ask questions of the database (see http://skyserver.sdss.org).
This talk explains the rationale for the WWT, discusses how we designed the
database, and talks about some data mining tasks. It also describes
computer science challenges of publishing, federating, and mining
scientific data, and argues that XML web services are key to federating
diverse data sources.
About the Speaker: Jim Gray is manager of Microsoft BARC in San Francisco.
His work focuses on databases and transaction processing. Jim is active
in the research community, is an ACM, NAE, NAS, and AAAS Fellow, and received
the ACM Turing Award for his work on transaction processing. He edits
a book series on data management, and is active in building massive online
scientific databases such as the TerraServer (http://terraService.Net/)
and SkyServer (http://skyserver.sdss.org). Jim is working with the
astronomy community to build the world-wide telescope, providing access
to all the world's astronomical data through the Internet.
